Where Fire Speaks Read online

  WHERE FIRE SPEAKS

  WHERE FIRE SPEAKS

  A Visit with the Himba

  photographs by

  DAVID CAMPION

  text by

  SANDRA SHIELDS

  with an introduction by

  HUGH BRODY

  WHERE FIRE SPEAKS

  Copyright © 2002 by David Campion and Sandra Shields

  Introduction copyright © 2002 by Hugh Brody

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical – without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  A PARALLAX book from

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  #101-211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

  www.arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing activities.

  Book and cover design: Solo

  Editing: Stephen Osborne

  Cover photographs: David Campion

  Printed and bound in Canada

  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA

  CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA:

  Campion, David, 1965-

  Where fire speaks

  (Parallax)

  ISBN 978-1-55152-131-2

  EISBN 978-1-55152-312-5

  1. Himba (African people)—Pictorial works. I. Shields, Sandra, 1965- II. Title. III. Series: Parallax (Vancouver, B.C.)

  DT1558.H56C35 2002 968.81’0049639 C2002-910928-0

  WHERE FIRE SPEAKS

  MAP

  INTRODUCTION BY HUGH BRODY

  ARRIVAL

  VISITING

  GOING TO TOWN

  POSTSCRIPT

  LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

  APPENDIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Hugh Brody

  Just about all human beings live with pressure: pressure to be ourselves; pressure to be more like someone else. The poorer we are, the more we are likely to feel pushed and pulled towards another way of being, some other, more secure way of getting the things we need and want. The more distinctive we are – the more rooted in an ethnic, racial, or religious identity – the more important it may seem to us that we hold on to who we are, or who our ancestors have been. Modernity – the global economy, homogenized values, freedom to move to where the money is – has intensified this split between the self that has roots in the past and the self that could, or must, belong in the future.

  For tribal and indigenous peoples, this split is at the center of their lives and politics. The pressures can be extreme. A sense of self comes from community lands, shared history, defining myths, distinctive clothes, ways of raising children, a language. To lose these, they say, is for such people to lose their place in the world, their links to their heritage and, all too often, their rights to their own resources. The tribal world has its own kinds of wealth – in the form of high quality food and the wisdom to live in a sustainable economy. Yet the lack of European goods and technologies means that they are seen as very poor – at least by the standards of those who hold the power in the world. Hence the pressure to become more like someone else – farm workers with regular wages, men and women with “good” educations and “true” religions who wear “civilized” clothes and follow the rituals of those with the wealth. And a hope or a dream – these can be pressures too – of the tribal child of today becoming the truck driver, shopkeeper, politician, pilot, and doctor of the future. The two kinds of pressures sit, of course, at the center of arguments about development. Everyone who is aware of land claims, aboriginal rights issues, and the struggle of First Nations to hold onto their lands and cultures has heard the arguments many times over. It is an argument that is as vociferous in parts of Africa as it is in Canada and the United States.

  The Himba are a tribal group whose lands lie in northern Namibia, a region of arid scrub, thinly wooded hills, and the fertile edges of the Kunene River. They are pastoralists, moving herds of goats and cattle, following the changes of season and climate, and using their distinctive understanding of land, animals, and their ancestors to live well despite the apparent harshness of their environment. The Himba have been among the most successful of African pastoralists, with large herds of animals and a secure economy in all but the worst periods of drought. They are seen as “poor” because of the relative simplicity of their technology and their appearance – the look of the “primitive” so fascinating to Europeans. So their real wealth is less important to outsiders than their appearance. This has two insidious consequences: they are deemed to need “development” because they are “poor”; and they themselves begin to believe they are poor, not counting their wealth in cattle and food so much as their lack of modern consumer goods and services. In the past twenty years, and especially since SWAPO came to power in Namibia and guerrilla war across the Namibia-Angola border ceased, the Himba have become a significant tourist attraction. They live in a spectacular landscape. They are beautiful, exotic, fascinating. Especially the women, whose braids, greased, and ochred skins and bare breasts are the object of intense interest – the focus of thousands of tourist cameras each year.

  The look of the Himba and their lands has duly become a resource. Tourists negotiate a price with the women to photograph them in their Himba costumes, and with Himba families to photograph them at their fires, beside their mud-covered huts, dancing. That which is tribal (and therefore deemed to be “ancient” and “traditional”) has monetary value. So this pressure to be the version of themselves that appears to exist outside modernity comes from modernity.

  At the same time, Namibian politicians have been saying that the Himba must give up their old ways, and accept development. There are plans for a dam to be built on the Kunene River, at Epupa Falls. In the arguments these plans have triggered, ministers in the Namibian government say that the government is determined to bring “economic development to all our communities,” and that the present lack of development in the Himba community “is a serious human rights violation.” The Namibian Minister of Trade has observed that the Himba must “learn to wear shirts and ties and suits like me and everyone else.” These are part of the pressure on the Himba to be more like other people – that is, more like those who are not so “traditional” and “poor” and “uncivilized.”

  So pressure on the Himba – on the one hand to look as Himba as possible, on the other hand to “develop” – comes from outside. Displays of wealth by tourists and images of modernity appear in front of Himba eyes just about every day of the year. These have their effect on how the Himba see themselves, and are their own kind of pressure, reaching from outside to inside the Himba world. There are also the wider, more general pressures that originate in two ideas – one about the future; the other about the past. Both these ideas are somewhat romantic – idealizations, perhaps, of economic and social life in which wishful thinking and naïve optimism shape the so-called facts. Those who want beautiful, bare-breasted Himba women for their cameras are not interested in the realities of Himba history (with its complicated changes of society and relations with neighbouring cultures); those who believe in “development” do not speak about the extreme poverty of the many in their societies who are displaced, landless laborers. Two kinds of romantic myth – the one of “tradition,” the other of “progress” – dominate the arguments.

  So what does the pre
sent, as opposed to fictions about the past and future, really look like? Who are the Himba of now? What is it like to travel there with a commitment to neither of the dominant forms of romanticism? David Campion’s photographs and Sandra Shields’ narrative – the two elements of this book – give answers to these questions. Two beautiful, laughing Himba girls, dressed in traditional clothes with their hair in magnificent braids, are at the center of one of the photographs; to the side, a little in the background, two tough-looking Himba youths, in western clothes, lean against a tree. In another photograph, a Himba woman sits in the foreground, but at the edge of the image: the rest is taken up by a group of white men repairing the engine of a jeep. Analogous juxtapositions appear in other of Campion’s wonderful pictures. A Himba and a Herrero woman, both in the clothes of their cultures, are looking over the lingerie, shirts, and shoes on sale at a roadside store; a young Himba woman squats in the dark corner of a small bar, her back to a heap of Coke crates. In photograph after photograph the different, and perhaps rival, elements of the real world of the present day are there to be seen. And the reader has the sense that this is incidental, rather than some plan, some political aesthetic. The images have rival images because realities of the present just do rival one another in the Himba world – as they do in all our worlds.

  But one of the most striking photographs of all in this book is the X-ray of a skull. A doctor holds it up to the light to look, thereby obscuring her own head. The head of the Himba whose skull is thus shown sits alongside, looking down, far away, being helped, yet seeming imprisoned. This is an image full of power – not because it is exotic, but because it is all too familiar. The helplessness as our head is taken into an X-ray, examined by a stranger, whom we can not know but on whom our very life may depend.

  In this book, the text makes the same kind of journey as the photographs – into the complicated, puzzling real. Sandra Shields allows the reader to come with her, both in the detail of the journey and in the unease the journey can (and probably should) cause to the traveler. She describes the way tourists buy the right to take photographs, seeking the trophy to take home that snapshots are; and is aware that she is also there to visit and take something home. She speaks of the inequality that exists between tourists, their vehicles loaded with supplies and equipment, and the Himba; and tells of the repeated requests for things that the visitors have. But she includes herself in this narrative, so allowing us to experience, through her account, the inner discomforts of being the relatively wealthy visitor.

  This is not a book that knows what is best for anyone, least of all for the Himba. It does not obscure the drinking, the begging, and the new great danger – of AIDS in a society that is less and less able to maintain sexual and social boundaries. It does not say the hydro project on the Kunene River is right or wrong. But it does voice a suspicion, which is implied also by many of the photographs, that the dam is as likely to be as destructive as it is beneficial to the Himba. The balance of these forces will depend not simply on whether or not it is built, but the way in which this is carried out. Development may have some chance of bringing benefits, but if, and only if, the land rights of those whose resources are being transformed are recognized. This is a book that makes a quiet, understated case for the Himba: the pace, scale, and process of development must be done with and for the Himba, as well for the nation as a whole.

  David Campion and Sandra Shields now live on the west coast of Canada. David grew up in Africa, and first visited the Himba in 1988. They traveled to Namibia together in 1995, impelled to go when they learned about the possibility of the Epupa dam being built and reading the words of a Namibian official: “The Himbas don’t want to stay like baboons. They also want television and lights in their homes.” They were funded by the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development. They wanted to see for themselves: was there a real threat to Himba well-being, to the lands on which they depended, to the ecology of one of Africa’s wildest rivers? Or was there an authentic – an appropriate and necessary – development?

  David and Sandra know from their own society what can happen to indigenous peoples when their lands are “developed.” They have seen the price that the original owners and occupiers of the land often must pay for “development” – be it for forestry, farming, or hydro-electric power. Awareness of their own country may have helped them to see the realities of another. Namibia is far away from Canada, but the fate of the Himba may not be all that different from that of many, many other tribal peoples. The rights of peoples to live in security on their own lands, and their right to the resources that lie in and on these lands, have been violated again and again in the history of colonialism and development. Newcomers to frontiers determined to acquire land, ideologues determined to bring “civilization” to the “primitive,” corporations intent on making profits from mega-projects, governments bent on modernizing their economies – these are forces in the modern world that speak of the good they can achieve while failing to recognize the harm that is done to some of the most vulnerable populations. The harm done includes loss of security, abuse of human rights, demoralization of the old, confusion of the young, destruction of environment, and disappearance of knowledge and languages.

  For many tribal peoples, everything that is theirs seems to have to be exchanged for things that come from elsewhere – things they may want and need, but things for which they have to pay a dismaying price. Sense and justice urge that all of us look at how to create development that is sustainable and authentic, where the benefits are real and the price is not exorbitant. People need development that is built on recognition of rights, and not on the relentless alienation of rights. The power of this book lies in its plea on behalf of the Himba, on behalf of all such peoples who are attracted to development, and yet threatened by it at the heart of who they have been in the past and need to be in the future. The power of this book comes from the way the authors speak to the past and future of one tribal group by seeing and describing the realities of here and now.

  – London 2002

  LINES

  The healer pulled loops of gut out of the belly of the goat and spread them on the ground. He was looking for a cure for his patient, a man of about forty-five whose three wives, naked except for skirts of animal hide and coils of jewelry, were sitting behind him. Other family members and a few curious neighbors had gathered in a circle, sharing the shade of a large mopane tree.

  The women glowed red-brown from the mixture of butterfat and crushed ochre rubbed into their skin. The butterfat protected them from the dry hot climate, the ochre made them gleam the color of the longhorn cattle that are the wealth of their families. This shimmering second skin stained everything they touched; the tree trunks they leaned against, the rocks they sat on, the babies they held, all took on an ochre sheen. As they waited for the healer to make his diagnosis, an airplane passed high overhead, invisible except for the white tail that it stretched across the sky. Nobody else saw it; they were all looking at the healer. My eyes went from the guts spread on the ground to the white line in the sky. It was probably a planeload of tourists on an African holiday. I thought about the people in the sky, the people on the ground, and the distance in between.

  The innards of the goat confirmed that the man was cursed and told the healer what must be done to undo the magic. The goat’s body was hung in the tree and we all followed the healer down to the dry stream bed where two goats were tethered in the bushes. It was time for the cure.

  In this part of southern Africa, the winter sky can stay cloudless and pale with heat for months on end. The airplane’s trail of exhaust hung in the faded blue. Below, in the arid reaches of Namibia, between the Skeleton Coast and the Kalahari Desert, the ten thousand people called the Himba moved their herds of goats and cows along routes worn into the hard earth by generations of bare feet.

  The sick man and one of his wives were told to sit down in the deep sand. The healer and another man grabbed o
ne of the goats by its legs and, despite much kicking, turned it upside down. They held the goat by its feet and circled the couple, then lifted the animal and passed it over the man and his wife. They did this several times.

  Next, the healer got the man to lie face-down with his hands outstretched in front of him. The men in the group covered him with sand until only his head was sticking out. He was left there for awhile. Eventually, the healer grasped the man’s hands, and pulled him slowly forward until his whole body emerged from the sand. Up in the sky, the airplane was long gone and the white line had disappeared.

  Arrival

  DEMONSTRATION VILLAGE

  We had come to Namibia to look into the possible effects that a hydro dam would have on the Himba people. We were traveling on a grant from a human rights organization and we intended to produce articles about the situation. According to what we’d read, the Himba were opposed to the dam, saying it would kill them, while the government was determined to capitalize on the hydro power of one of the country’s few permanent rivers. We had driven from South Africa and were planning on staying as long as we could. We had been driving north for five days when the fences stopped following us. On the sixth day, the wide gravel road narrowed to a dirt track and after awhile we came to a sign telling us we had arrived at a “Traditional Village,” and warning us not to walk between “holy fires” and the cattle pen or the main hut. We parked near a circle of round mud huts and six girls came running. They pointed excitedly and seemed to want everything in sight, the blanket on the seat of our truck, the string of beads around my neck. “Candy,” said the girl who looked oldest. “Candy?” I said. “Candy,” she replied.

  The girls led us over to the huts, bouncing up and down, and speaking in a language that we didn’t understand. We responded in English and the whole exchange had a giddy feel. The oldest girl walked beside me, repeating my words in her clear bright voice. The only other people in the village seemed to be an old woman and a teenage girl. The old woman sat alone, hunched over a cooking fire. We tried the greeting we had learned from a travel magazine, saying moro moro and getting moro moro in return.